Telephone landline "crackling" sound--observations please ?

Hi, My landline has a lot of crackling/static noise.Seven months ago BT came a renewed two boxes which they claimed had become corroded with age and condensation. Now the same problem has returned. Often the line is clear for 20 to

30 seconds then the noise starts and varies in level. They charged =A3128 then, for what I could and should have done. My fault. Should have realised. Wondering if anyone else has had a similar problem. Am thinking an electrician who claims to know about such things might be able to do a more lasting job more cheaply. I have done all the checks BT recommends and others I can think of including attaching an old corded phone and taking all other plugs out. Now we are with O2 and all they will suggest, of course, is to call in BT again. Any and all observations will be appreciated and valued. Thank you. David G.
Reply to
gilli
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If it's a voice fault BT should fix it without charge, just don't mention broadband when you speak to them.

Reply to
Jeff Gaines

If you have a BT master socket, with a separate faceplate as the bottom half, unscrew and removed and then plug your phone into the rear part and listen again. This removes all internal wiring and simply connects you to the BT pair. If it's still noisy, it's their problem, not yours.

Reply to
Andy Cap

Hide quoted text -

I read somewhete that you have to pay the full whack whether it's their problem or yours if you have broadband. Is that really the case? Consequently a friend of mine was disconnecting and hiding his BB stuff when he had a fault repaired recently. But surely they know you're BB enabled?

Chris

Reply to
chrisj.doran

If you don't already have one, it's best to have a master socket fitted where the line comes into the house - regardless if it will be used or not. This allows you to unplug the internal house wiring and plug a phone direct to the line. Thus showing if the fault is in the line or house wiring.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Certainly report a voice fault in preference to a broadband fault (if both exist) as you have less companies involved wondering who will be paying.

Reply to
Andy Burns

Depends on what you mean by "have", and also on who your ISP is.

If BT don't supply your broadband, BT have zero interest in fixing your broadband. They are also using this (in a way that Ofcom should stomp on) as a way to drive people to use BT as their broadband provider. Bastards.

The mere fact that you also have broadband though is no reason for BT to not fix your faulty voice landline. If you report the fault as a voice problem, they will still fix it for free (test it's upstream of the master socket though).

If you have a good ISP, they may hassle BT on your behalf. As they have a contract with BT to supply the local loop, then BT will listen to them. However most ISPs are poor at doing this - particularly if they'd rather sell you _their_ local loop service instead, be this cable TV or unbundled PSTN.

Check first that it's not _your_ cabling, especially not your microfilter (microfilters are prone to getting kicked). As a bare minimum, have an NTE style BT faceplate and fit an ADSL filter in that faceplate (tenner from TLC et al, if you don't already have one).

Reply to
Andy Dingley

I recently had a voice and broadband fault. I reported the voice fault and they asked if broadband was also affected so I said yes. No problem about accepting the fault and fixing it FOC.

Reply to
Piers Finlayson

No point lying about it, but if they didn't ask I'd probably only mention the broadband aspect of the fault when they arrived to fix the voice fault ...

Reply to
Andy Burns

How do you work that out?

The great british public wanted the BT monopoly broken up and wanted competition, which is what they got. BT even created a new division (Openreach) at Ofcom's behest so that all customers, whether they are customers of TalkTalk, Tiscali, Zen, BT or whoever, all get treated the same. If your ISP is Zen, you get an Openreach engineer working on Zen's behalf. If your ISP is BT, you get an Openreach engineer working on BT's behalf, and you take your place in the queue just like the Zen or TT customers do.

Reply to
Pete Zahut

Report it as a voice fault, _not_ broadband, to BT (assuming you pay your line rental to BT - if not, report it to whoever you pay your line rental to) but only after you're absolutely, very, sure that it is on their side and is nothing to do with your own wiring in the house. There's a good chance that the symptoms you describe are caused by a high resistance joint somewhere and if that's the case, it may well test as OK when they run diagnostics on it. This is because the voltages/currents that the test equipment gives out are capable of 'jumping' the high resistance gap.

Reply to
Pete Zahut

If I've interpreted your post correcty, you've already eliminated the 'phone by substitution (if not, do so!).

Plug your known good 'phone into BT's Master socket with nothing else connected.

If the fault is still there, call BT again. The fault is on THEIR network - tell them to get it sorted!

Reply to
Terry Casey

That certainly was not the case when I had problems with my line. OpenReach came out and repaired the damage, at no charge to me. And yes, the engineer knew I had BB.

Reply to
S Viemeister

I once had variable line crackling for some months, but nothing to do with joints, It turned out to be corrosion in several places in the clear plastic overhead line from their pole to my house eaves probably installed 1977'ish. BT fixed it for free. Perhaps they had a bad batch of cable at that time.

the rusty one.

Reply to
therustyone

Not IME. I had crackling and broadband but they fixed it FOC. I did what other replies have suggested: tried a different phone (it still crackled) and then I removed the front of the master socket to isolate "my"/the indoors wiring and plugged the phone direct into the master socket's internal socket; there was still crackling, so we knew it was in their cable/their fault. It turned out that it was due to water in the manhole, which had flooded their cabling.

HTH Stephen.

Reply to
Stephen

No. Absolutely not.

Noisy calls is a telephony fault completely seperate from BB.

Which is what the OP should do.

Reply to
Huge

Its such that BT provide a voice circuit and if its OK on voice then they deem it to be OK. However your ISP should take this up with BT we had a supplier who once blamed BT and BT blamed them . No go(..

Changed ISP to Zen who got BT or openreach sorted out and no problems since.

They will if they can charge you so if you can record the noise its good evidence .. especially if its at all intermittent..

Reply to
tony sayer

In article , Terry Casey scribeth thus

Use 17070 option 3 IIRC Quiet line test I think its still there...

Reply to
tony sayer

Locally (Edinburgh) it's option 2.

I've had this crackle problem on 2 different lines, and what made it really frustrating to deal with was the fact that the crackling could be made to go away temporarily by either using option 1 (ringback test) or by BT's faults lady who ran a remote test which "proved that the line was OK".

I happened to have a phone with an LED ring indicator, and noticed that their line test caused the LED to flash briefly. In other words the test sends high voltage pulses down the line - and that temporarily cleared the fault in the same way as the ring signal did.

Reply to
Windmill

All domestic lines already have a master socket. It may not be the "linebox" type with the split front, and if so the extensions should be plugged in not hardwired.

The master socket and the line from there to the exchange belongs to the network provider (Openreach, unless it's a cable line or you're in Hull). Any repairs to it are their responsiblilty, and covered by the line rental. Any wiring beyond the master socket belongs to the house owner and is their responsibility to fix, as are the handsets.

As other posters have said, before reporting a fault you should disconnect all the extensions and plug a phone into the master socket (in fact you should try two different phones, in case the phone is faulty). If the fault goes away, it's in your wiring and you have to fix it. If it doesn't, it's in the line itself and your supplier has to get it fixed.

Mike

Reply to
Mike Humphrey

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